majnu
Distinguished Member
Developer Thechineseroom struck surprise success with Dear Esther, a bizarre first-person non-game on PC, and now it's revealed details for its spiritual successor.
It's called 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture', and sounds every bit of experimental, while being more of an actual game while it's at it.
It's a first-person open-world game set in Shropshire and takes place in the final hour before the end of the world. Creative director Dan Pinchbeck says it seeks to explore how people in small rural town would react to an apocalypse.
"So we had this idea of going, 'Actually, if the world ended in a little village in Shropshire, it'd be inconvenient'", he said.
Each time you play the game you have 60 minutes to explore and interact with as much as possible (that's right - unlike the previous game this one has actual interaction).
But the world is pretty large. "If you wanted to go diagonally from one corner to the other, it'd probably take you around 20 minutes," says Pinchbeck. So you'll need multiple play-throughs to see everything, and it thus designed for replayability.
The game has a cast of six people who but you might not necessarily have any company in your quest. "They're almost kind of memory traces of people that were there," explains Pinchbeck, "and how we represent them, and whether we do full-on character builds or whether we do something more symbolic, we're still kind of chewing around with."
If Dear Esther was too minimalistic for you, this will come as a relief: "We're looking at making it much more physically interactive [than Dear Esther], so you can manipulate objects, you can open and close doors," Pinchbeck said. "[And] without it being too much like easter egg rewards, the game will reward you for exploring and interacting. So there are places which are not obvious to get to, and you have to do things in order to get to them."
The CryEngine 3-powered game will be out next year
PC News: Dear Esther dev details next game 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' - CVG UK#
